Should the next Democratic president pull federal funds from red states?

There has been a recent string of new court filings in which the Trump administration has admitted, flat out, that it has been systemically terminating federal funds to Democratic-leaning states specifically because they were Democratic-leaning states.

That is, our gross little fascist regime has intentionally been cancelling funding to states that voted against Republicans, "solely" for the sin of not voting for Republicans.

Jeff Novak, a lawyer for the U.S. Energy Department, admitted in court documents that when his agency announced in October 2025 it was terminating hundreds of Biden-era grants worth more than $7.5 billion, it wasn’t for the reason given at the time [...]

Instead, Novak wrote, the decision was “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.” 

That's just one case in a new string of similar court admissions. The grants in question were the ones that the overtly fascist Russell Vought, the Heritage Foundation goon behind "Project 2025" who Trump immediately installed as the director of his Office of Management and Budget and who has been giddily dismantling the republic ever since, terminated in an October 2025 social media post killing grants in 16 of the 19 states that voted for Kamala Harris the previous year.

It also follows a pattern of Trump blocking disaster relief funds to Democratic states even as he approves funds to Republican ones. Both of these are apparently just things that happen now; if Dear Leader or one of his rancid lickspittles is angry at your state or governor for not polishing Dear Leader's boots to the expected sheen, then you can die of hypothermia or try to patch up your own wrecked power grid or fight off Iranian cyberattacks against your drinking water supply on your own. You won't get any help from a now-fascist federal government.

They're going to instead just take the money and spend it on whatever they want to spend it on—maybe Dear Leader wants another equestrian statue suffocated under a few million dollars worth of gold leaf, something he thinks will impress foreign tourists, or maybe he wants a new $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off insurrectionist rioters who tried to overthrow our federal government on his behalf.

It's just a thing that happens now, and you won't find a Republican who thinks it shouldn't. Which is a pretty clarifying moment, or at least might be to anyone who can set aside their outrage fatigue long enough to really absorb it.

Donald Trump's "Project 2025" goon squad is stripping federal aid to states that did not support Trump's reelection, a sort of reverse-secession move in which Vought and Miller and the rest of the squad are booting states from full participation in the union because, and this is a theme I feel we're going to keep coming back to both in the next few months and next half century both, they are irredeemable pieces of shit who would rather destroy America than give up white conservative power over it.

And that's just scientific fact. Read the policy papers these people put out before gaining power, there's no non-piece-of-shit thought peeking out anywhere. To them, even accurate weather forecasting is "woke"—because it dilutes the power of private industry to turn "people wondering whether or not they need to evacuate to higher ground" into their newest profit source.

Republican lawmakers remain silent about all of this, which raises the obvious question: Do they really think America now ought to work this way, or do they consider it only a Republican right to inflict willful damage on American states they don't like? We can speculate on that answer, and I expect that intuitively we all know damn well what the answer is because it's not exactly something they've kept mysterious in recent years, but we can't answer the question definitively until they themselves do.

So maybe we should just ... do that? Test it, I mean.

This is all assuming that the nation survives Dear Idiot Leader's presidency, his army of criminal minions, and whatever our tech overlords have planned for us next, of course. It assumes that there will at some point be a Democratic president, perhaps one elected after gasoline gets to $8 a gallon and the military is reduced to throwing rocks at Iran to keep Dear Idiot Leader's war going long after the rest of the munitions have run out. Let's suppose that new Democratic president gets elected.

Speculating on who that person might be would immediately derail the conversation, though, so let's instead say that the next election is won by, let's say the ghost of Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter is really the only modern American president who proved himself to be decent through-and-through even decades after leaving office, so we'll give him this imaginary honor in recognition of that fact. We'll say Jimmy Carter got so enraged by the grotesque cruelty and obvious flimflammery of politics that he hauled his impeccably decent ass back down from Heaven, manifested himself as a ghost, campaigned for another presidential term and handily won it after Jesus Himself came down to cut ads for him. He still didn't get the conservative evangelical vote, and JD Vance quickly slapped together a whole new book opining about all the ways Jesus Himself was wrong about religion and could learn a few things from JD Vance, but Ghost Jimmy Carter wins the election, gets sworn in, immediately trots back off to Heaven again and leaves the vice president, who turns out to be your favorite candidate who you wanted to be president all along, to assume the presidency.

So what if that new Democratic president, whoever it turns out to be, announces that from now on they're going to be withholding federal funds to Republican-won states because those states voted wrong?

Sorry, Texas, you don't get highway money from here on in. Sucks to be you, Florida, but from now on we're only going to provide disaster relief to Democratic states. Maybe when the next hurricane hits you can go pound some sand, see if that helps. That sand isn't gonna pound itself.

What do we suppose would be the reaction, from Republican lawmakers, if a Democratic president announced the withdrawal of federal aid to Republican states?

Should we try it? You know, just as an experiment. In fact, there wouldn't have to be any followthrough—the whole thing could be a White House-run hoax, that being another thing that apparently White Houses are both allowed to do and which is even considered Good, now. After the first natural disaster hits a Republican state, the Democratic president can quietly sign the papers handing over the requested aid, then hold a big White House press gaggle announcing that he didn't intend to sign anything because only Democratic-voting states get disaster relief now, so sorry, them's the breaks.

What.

Do we think.

Would happen.

Suddenly and unanimously, we can predict, Republican lawmakers would find their voices. Sen. Rand Paul would look up from his Reasons I Hate Anthony Fauci coloring book and immediately find his outrage. Sen. Ted Cruz, one of the hackiest hacks to ever hack, would turn purple with rage and announce that this was the end of the republic, this moment of this day, because the thought of intentionally harming Americans as punishment for a political squabble was too evil to even be contemplated, much less acted on. He didn't notice it before because, you know, vacation time or whatever, but now that a Republican state is being threatened he'll bring thirty cans of fury and his own personal can opener.

A Democratic president announcing that states that didn't vote for him wouldn't be getting federal funds would be met with armed conservative militias in the streets, and they would start killing people. House Speaker Mike Johnson would even take a momentary break from having sex with his mother to let reporters know that he had seen the news, he had seen the hell out of this particular news, and that impeachment proceedings would begin immediately.

None of this, aside from maybe the supposition that there could be something happening somewhere that would make Mike Johnson stop having sex with his mother, is in question. It's a given. It's a given that Republicans are "allowed" to intentionally harm either the whole country or individually targeted states for the sake of any supposed new agenda, and it's a given that Democrats are not.

The press believes this instinctively. It is taken as a given that Democrats will act with decency, and when a Democrat doesn't act with decency than it is a national scandal and will fill the papers and the airwaves until Consequences are secured. But it's similarly taken as a given that Republicans are, put simply, uniformly pieces of shit who cannot be expected to conform to our nation's most rudimentary norms because, well, look at them. You wouldn't expect a piece of shit to have a moral compass any more than you would expect it to know algebra.

Democrats are expected to keep the whole country humming, even for the Americans that hate their guts because a Democrat once told them they shouldn't hold a gun to their wife's head and so now "I should be allowed to hold my wife at gunpoint" is their only political philosophy. And Republicans get to lie to Congress, and get to make a billion dollars in money-laundered bribes, and get to appoint their personal lawyers to posts in the Department of Justice in the continuing multiyear effort to cover up the full scope of the sex trafficking crimes they've been implicated in.

And that is how you know that there is no "Republicanism" that exists outside the fascism. It's a testable premise; a Democratic president could crookedly demand false indictments of their enemies, could launch a $100,000-a-pop program giving subscribing Wall Street traders special access to new White House policy announcements before America itself gets told about them, or could zero out federal grants to states that didn't vote the "right way" and all of the Republican senators who are remaining so deadly silent now would immediately rediscover their ability to have raging public shitfits at the corruption of it all. You could pry Mike Johnson away from having sex with his mother long enough to get an opinion from him; he might even stop having sex with his mother for hours at a time in his newfound outrage. Maybe four hours, maybe even five.

But it won't happen, because Democrats don't do such things. All of the crookedness that Rand Paul, John Thune, Thom Tillis, and the corpse of Lindsey Graham consider too essential to the Republican movement to rein in is crookedness meant only for them, not for anyone else.

Talking Points Memo is the first outlet I've seen trying to connect the dots on this new pattern of Trump administration lawyers flatly telling judges that yes, the administration has been cancelling billions of dollars of congressionally allocated funding to Harris-voting states "solely" because their voters voted against Trump. There's only one reason why the Trump administration would be signing court documents that assert the states and entities suing them were right and should win, and that's because those administration lawyers are trying very damn hard to keep something much, much worse hidden.

“What the administration is admitting to have done in court is so blatantly illegal and derelict that it has to at least make you wonder what kind of communication passed between the White House and the department, or within the department, that could have led to it,” Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ federal fiscal policy team, told TPM. [...]

“What seems to be really going on is that the government in these cases is absolutely terrified of discovery,” one attorney familiar with the litigation told TPM.

Indeed, as new cases wind through the system, the Department of Energy seems to be getting more desperate in their attempts to avoid turning over internal documents related to the decision. Please! We beg you! Just let us lose this case!

“In our case, we had already served extensive discovery, so DOE knew that it was not just a hypothetical that we would seek documents and seek to depose many DOE people with knowledge of what happened prior terminations,” Claudia Polsky, counsel for the University of California researchers in Thakur, told TPM. “And DOE was extremely nervous and approached us about stipulations. They were absolutely determined to avoid discovery by stipulation if they could.”

So there is something here that, behind the scenes, is much much worse than the already-bad case of the Trump administration erasing $8 billion in aid to "blue states" because Russell Vought wanted to show Americans who their fascist daddy was. And I think I speak for all of us in saying we are all dying to know what that worse thing could possibly be, because making off with congressionally mandated funding for funsies has been at every previous time in history a pretty f—ing big deal even without adding new crooked layers to it.

What could the administration possibly be hiding, in those documents it doesn't want to give up, that's worse than the nation-wrecking we already know about?

Was Russell Vought eating a live baby, when he was composing his social media boasts about cutting off the funds? Did the White House funnel the $8 billion they took into the construction of new diesel-powered toddler-munchers? Did every male Republican in Congress get ten new diamond-encrusted handguns they could threaten their wives with? What the flying hell could there possibly be left to reveal that even these hitlersucking bootlickers think America couldn't stomach hearing about?

I don't know, but the odds that we'll find out eventually are pretty high. Secrets like that don't stay secrets forever.

And in the meantime, we're still left with the question. Do Republicans truly mean that America should work like this, from here on out? That cultish leaders can simply scribble out budgets, spend collected tax money on whatever they feel like, strip money from whoever they feel like, and file false indictments against any Americans that get uppity about it? That's what Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, all the others truly believe the new America should look like, now that Dear Leader has decided it?

Or all they all just, you know. Crooks. Absolute, unabashed, shameless crooks who are coordinating with Trump to do as many crooked things as possible before they get run out of office and have to pretend at not being crooks for a while.